Category Archives: About Lady Liberty

I must eat at least twice per day, aiming for thrice, and four times on a busy day. Basically, I’ll eat as often as possible without getting silly. The game clock runs rather fast, so a regular eating schedule may not be possible, but I can make this up by eating lots before and after a long day, so an average will be maintained. It goes without saying that if I fail to eat for three days, it’s game over.

I must sleep every day, within reason (an occasional all-nighter is hardly unlikely for a poor immigrant).

I must maintain any vehicle in my care. That means paying for fuel, and repairing any damage, barring the completely trivial (eg: a small dent isn’t a big deal, but a broken headlight is unlawful and therefore must be repaired).

Now, these last two rules are the most important, as they’re the two that may cause the most conflict. Firstly, I must pay my bills. I’ve estimated $300 per week on living costs (excluding costs listed above), and must raise this money by any means necessary. But! And this is the big one:

I must not break the law. The whole point of this is to see if I can make it as a law-abiding citizen. As you can imagine, this is not totally black and white. If I get desperate for money, I might have to cross that line. Also, let’s face it, nobody’s totally law abiding (apart from that one incredibly uptight, boring guy at work who is destined to die in a hail of police bullets after his inevitable psychotic break), and there will surely be times when I’ll break the speed limit or get boozed up and wind up in a fight. However, to help police this, I’ve installed mods that criminalise dangerous driving, speeding, etc. Abiding by the law also means following the rules of the road.

I should probably declare here that I don’t actually drive in real life, much less in the USA, so when I say ‘rules of the road’, I mean the obvious ones, like stopping at red lights, sticking to speed limits, and never indicating when someone is crossing the road, then giving them a shitty look like it’s their fault you’re a useless idiot, and being surprised when they respond by standing still in front of your car and examining their fingernails.

But anyway.

Other rules… well, to be honest, I haven’t played GTA4 enough to say for sure whether I’ll need more rules. So we’ll play that by ear.

So. GTA 4, then. You’ve heard of Grand Theft Auto, of course. You’re not old enough to be on the internet if you haven’t. If you’ve been playing games for long, you’ll likely be very familiar with the series, but I’m going to press on anyway, because GTA’s history is rather important.

A crash course in case you’re new to Earth: Starting out in 1997 as simple, even backwards-looking 2D driving/shooting game, Grand Theft Auto’s irreverent humour, lively city environments and freeform driving/shooting gameplay caught the gaming world’s imagination. As a lowly dogsbody for a variety of local criminals, the player was set loose in a city to carry out missions for them, or more often, simply cause as much havoc as you liked by stealing cars, starting fights, fleeing from the police, and generally being a bastard. The city, crucially, went about its business without you either way.

After a London-based spin-off and much improved sequel, GTA 2, it reinvented itself in 3D in 2001 with GTA 3, an ambitious, hard-to-classify action game that popularised sandbox gameplay and essentially confirmed its style of gameplay as a whole genre.

From then on, GTA was no longer a slightly niche novelty title, but instead one of the most famous (or infamous, depending on your outlook) and influential game series of the last decade. Every new release in the series is hotly anticipated, and just about everyone has tried to emulate its success in one way or another. Indeed, the “game” neighbourhoods of the internet went a bit mad when GTA 5 was announced last week, just as I was putting the finishing touches on the mod setup for this. Hmph.

The series continued strongly in 2004/5 with GTA San Andreas, which had a rather “kitchen sink” design, with loads of new features apparently thrown into a monstrously huge and varied game world. Its plot also took a somewhat more character-centric and dramatic turn, as opposed to the lightweight, naked parody the series had stuck with so far.

GTA 4 was released in early 2008 on the funsquare, to much acclaim. Personally, I found it rather boring and repetitive, although a staggering technical achievement, and it painted an impressively detailed and complex world. The story had definitely taken centre stage, and many of San Andreas’ details had been dropped in favour of a more ‘real’ and complex setting. It was well-written and acted, with a high standard of voice acting and impressive production values, but its cut scenes of drama and moral pontificating over immigration, American life, and reluctant murder didn’t really sit well with gameplay that encouraged you to freely murder hundreds of innocent people in between cut scenes just for a laugh. Oh, and you had to spend half the bloody game answering phone calls from sulky friends demanding you drop everything and take them bowling, the bastards. There’s such a thing as too much realism, right?

Its protagonist, Niko Bellic, was original and well-drawn, and will quite rightly remain one of the most famous game characters for years to come, but… well. I’d played Saints Row the year before, and that’s a series that remembers why everyone fell for GTA in the first place: It was stupid, senseless fun. It’s rather telling that the most fun I had with GTA 4 was watching the in-game tv channels, and later, repeatedly nudging a fat man until he fell over.

I know how it looks, but I assure you it thoroughly sends up its own ‘gangsta’ theme. Saints Row: The Third is due out later this year. This is a trailer for it (photosensitive epilepsy warning: It’s a bit like they’re trying to kill you). Saints Row is not a series that asks “why?”.

But back to GTA 4. The PC release came later, and was… turbulent. Plagued with bugs and other technical issues, it caused rather a fuss among the PC crowd. It didn’t help that it required a fairly monstrous machine to run respectably. Indeed, even today, three years on, it’s not going to give every PC’s hardware an easy time. Fortunately, I happen to have a pretty decent PC, and as a tip-off from Rock, Paper, Shotgun about a recent fireside sale of the entire GTA series happened to coincide with my pondering a new feature, I was able to put together a cunning plan.

I wasn’t overly fond of GTA 4, but I scratched the surface of its background world and was impressed. For all my complaints, I never really gave it a fair hearing. I criticised the game for what it wasn’t, rather than what it was, something I’ve since learned is seldom reasonable or fair. But I’ve since acquired a machine that can hack it, and discovered a variety of mods that have helped tailor it to suit my plans.

What are my plans, you ask? Well. I will learn to appreciate the time and massive amounts of effort Rockstar put into this world. I will do this by living in it, only this time, not as an ultra-rich, demi-mortal mass murdering crime lord, but instead, as just another poor migrant trying to get by in a strange and foreign city.

One of many victims of our troubled times, Kinaya grew tired looking for increasingly scarce and insecure jobs, of being refused opportunities she knew she would take full advantage of, of watching her town slowly board itself up and drift away with the wind. So, selling all her remaining gear, and putting on, for some reason, her most dreadful clothes, she gathered all her eggs, and threw them carelessly into one basket.

Which basket, you ask? This one:

The biggest basket in virtual America: GTA 4’s Liberty City.

Anyone can come here and make it big (provided they have no qualms about robbing and murdering absolutely everyone they meet, sometimes in that order). It’s the pride of pretend America, and a highly impressive technological achievement, even though the game’s several years old; a modern metropolis teeming with life, with all its clamour, colour, and simmering violence. Many a criminal has made their way here and made it big within weeks.

But I am no criminal. I came here looking for an honest living. I will sleep, eat, and breathe in this city, enjoying its sights, exploring its secrets, and mingling with its people.

From nothing, Kina will earn her place in this city, as a decent, normal, law-abiding citizen. She will be…